Nicaragua now has, for practical purposes, no independent press operating on its own soil. Nearly two decades into Daniel Ortega’s presidency, and eight years after the anti-government protests of April 2018, the country’s media landscape has been reduced to state and family-controlled outlets, a scattered diaspora of exiled newsrooms, and legal architecture built to keep both from ever converging again. A Strategy Refined Over Two Decades A report from the exiled journalist network Las Exiliadas Nicas, produced with support from Reporters Without Borders Spain and presented in Madrid in April 2026, describes the campaign in stark terms: sixty-one media outlets shut down, journalists imprisoned, more than 300 forced into exile, and roughly two-thirds of Nicaraguan territory left without any local news coverage at all, what press-freedom monitors now call a “news desert.” The pattern is not new, but it has accelerated. According to Freedom House’s 2026 country report, the independent

On paper, Sweden looks like one of the safest countries in the world to be a journalist. In Reporters Without Borders’ 2026 World Press Freedom Index, the country ranks 5th out of 180 nations, a mark most governments would envy. But a new report released by RSF just days before Sweden’s 13 September general election tells a more complicated story: one of quiet erosion, growing hostility toward reporters, and a public-access tradition under strain. The report, titled “Closed Doors: Local Journalists on Press Freedom Challenges in the 2026 Election Year,” surveyed 25 permanently employed journalists working in local and regional Swedish newsrooms between March and May 2026. It does not claim to be statistically representative of the profession as a whole. But the pattern it documents is consistent enough to be alarming: transparency is shrinking, harassment is common, and many journalists expect things to get worse, not better. A Ranking

As South Africa’s anti-migrant movement passed its self-declared June 30 deadline for undocumented foreigners to leave the country, journalists covering the unrest increasingly found themselves the targets of the very violence they were sent to document. At least 15 journalists have been targeted across South Africa in recent months. News24 journalist Sakhiseni Nxumalo was threatened while filming an assault on a Zimbabwean man in Pietermaritzburg, with protesters accusing him of being a foreigner because of his skin tone and demanding he delete his footage. Days later, a News24 intern covering a demonstration in Boksburg was surrounded by protesters carrying whips who questioned his nationality and forced him to sing the national anthem to prove he was South African. The pattern extends beyond physical intimidation. Journalists at several major outlets, including Business Day, GroundUp, the Sowetan, and the South African Broadcasting Corporation, have faced online harassment, doxxing, and accusations of bias